Marginalized Voices and Most Significant Change: Early Lessons Learned from Intentional Design

The Disability Rights Fund (DRF) places decision-making in the hands of disability rights leaders and activists, and, as a result, prioritizes the voice of persons with disabilities in our monitoring, evaluation and learning activities. In 2017, DRF began to use most significant change (MSC) principles for internal learning among its program team through a process called reflection discussions. The result was an annual set of lessons learned based on the perspective of grantees and persons with disabilities. In 2022 DRF began project to empower women disability rights activist and build cross-national movements in West Africa called Holding Rights, Leading Rights. The project began to utilize MSC to collect monitoring date beyond quantitative logframe indicators. To minimize barriers that persons with disabilities and marginalized groups often face in evaluation processes, DRF decided to conduct the MSC process internally and make methodological adjustments as needed. The process included using the DRF Grantee Monitoring Evaluation & Learning (GMEL) Reference Group as a review panel within the MSC stories selection process. DRF will share what questions it considered in making the process accessible to persons with disabilities, addressing power dynamics through the selection process, and building capacity of grantees around this methodology. DRF will also share its early lessons learned, the challenges they encountered, and how they addressed those challenges in a participatory and rights-based process.